In your report “Homeless service axed” (February 12) you document the withdrawal of Wiltshire Council's grant to Community4.

This will result in there being no service any more in Wiltshire to help people avoid homelessness.

The support worker quoted in your report stated that he is working with 22 clients, all of whom either have a disability or illness, or lack basic skills needed to live independently.

In fact, most people who are homeless, or who are threatened with homelessness, are vulnerable for one reason or another. In previous decades, homeless people would have been given a roof over their heads in the workhouse.

Workhouses have had a bad press because of Dickens. In some cases this was deserved, but many were run humanely, in the interests of those who were forced to live there. Have we completely forgotten the Good Samaritan role of the workhouse in respect of health?

The majority of the workhouses cared for the sick, either in a ward or in an infirmary.

It is only in my lifetime that the workhouse disappeared, and their infirmaries, in 1947, were the origin of most NHS district hospitals.

Jane Scott's assertion that more effective ways to run Wiltshire Council's services must be found, and that they would continue to support their own tenants, misses the point entirely. Wiltshire Council's own tenants by definition are not homeless, and I see nothing of concern on Jane Scott's part, or on the part of Wiltshire Council “where everybody matters”, for people who are homeless.

Anita Pheby

Salisbury